Wikisource:What is Wikisource?

This page provides a general outline of what Wikisource is, introduces its policies, etc. This page is good for initial reference, but it should not be used to find specific information; see instead the Index.

This page attempts to define what Wikisource is, what it is not, and what distinguishes it from other Wikimedia projects. The descriptions on this page are relatively brief, but contain links to more detailed policy pages. Discussion of policies should take place on the relevant policy talk pages.

Wikisource – originally called Project Sourceberg as a play on words for Project Gutenberg – began in November 2003, as a collection of supporting texts for articles in Wikipedia. It grew rapidly, reaching a total of 20,000 text units in various languages by May 18, 2005.

In August and September of 2005, Wikisource moved to separate subdomains for different languages.

While Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, Wikisource is a library. Wikipedia contains articles about books, while Wikisource includes the book itself. To some extent both may include bibliographical material about the author.

The wiki pages on most Wikimedia projects are designed to evolve forever. Typical examples are Wikipedia articles or Wikibooks study guides.

By contrast, Wikisource is a library of static texts that have already been published elsewhere. In many or most cases, these texts are not meant to change and evolve, and it would deeply hurt their integrity if they did! Therefore, Wikisource has adopted a policy of noting text quality and "protecting" pages from editing once they are thought to be correctly formatted and error-free. Comments about needed changes or corrections can always be made on the talk page and if necessary the page can be unprotected.

In this way, Wikisource is more similar to Wikinews, which "protects" the pages in its news archives for historical integrity.

Neutral Point of View (NPOV) is a major policy followed by most, but not all, projects in the Wikimedia family. A neutral point of view on Wikisource means faithfully reproducing and crediting the original texts, without editors putting their own emphasis on certain parts of the text or reproducing only certain parts of the text. There is no need for the original texts themselves to reflect a neutral point of view.

Introductory and other explanatory material should always be written with NPOV in mind.